Focusing on current affairs and public relations, the Uncaged PR blog will look at my views on the world through the eyes of a PR student.

July 2011

07/04/2011

So how dedicated are you Facebook and Twitter followers? If you were to ask them to unfollow one of your pages and follow another, how many would do so?

My question stems from a current dilemma caused by Facebook changing the 'groups' app and in doing so not carrying your existing followers over to the new format. This I imagine will cause a problem for many organisations that have an organisational Facebook group, leaving us all wondering how we get people to reconnect to our new Facebook page.

I’ll be the first to admit that our current Facebook group doesn’t have the largest amount of followers, but trying to get them all to follow our new page will be difficult. Did our current followers simply click the like button on Facebook after reading no more than five words? I often find myself clicking the like button on numerous comical groups base purely on their name, never to look at the content of the group I’ve liked. The Birmingham City relegation party 2011 been just one of many groups I’ve liked over the last six months.

Is it the case that ten out of every 100 followers are actually interested in our group or page, whilst the other 90 are committing the same offence as I commit on a weekly basis? I guess the only way to really judge this would be by monitoring the process of asking current group followers to start following our new page. I’d have to say that if you achieved just 10% moving over to the new page you’d have a small success. The 10% figure comes from our current success rate after just one week of informing members of the inevitable changes to our beloved Facebook group.

We are all aware of the limits that challenge us in social media use. Should it be trying not to bombard our followers with too many updates, trying to get them to ‘like’ our latest photo competition, or trying to get them to engage in conversation via our social media platforms. These are all complications we face in everyday use, with only small percentages of followers participating. Now what chance do we have in actually getting our followers to move with us as Facebook continues to develop and improve its services?

I’ve spent days thinking this over, trying to figure out how I achieve 100% success. In the end I’ve come to the conclusion that it just isn’t going to happen. Instead, I have decided that this should be a new start for our Facebook followers. A few messages to existing users will go out, but those that chose not to move with us will have to be left behind. Ideally we only want followers who are willing to engage with us as an organisation and help spread our messages further, so why should we aim for that 100% success rate? In my eyes we shouldn’t. It seems like an impossible task.

The issue with social media in healthcare has always been that the ones who follow our social media feeds are those that have a keen interest in health, and do not need healthcare messages forced down their necks. They are aware of the conditions and how to be tested, treated etc etc. Our issue is getting the attention of those that couldn’t care less about their health, and eat fatty foods and drink fizzy pop. Much like myself.

Does this mean all healthcare social media is hitting the wrong target audience, or do we merely hope that just a few of our followers spread the message further, with each retweet carrying a little extra weight behind it due to the retweeter. I also wonder if that makes someone who retweets and retweet and reretweeter?

Back to the point

My tactics to date have been to message our old followers once a week in a nice polite manner to inform them of the changes on the way. Let them know about what the new page has to offer. This I hope will be enough to encourage at least 25% of the current followers over to the new page, a figure we are close to hitting.

The point of starting up this blog was to engage with professionals and also students, to let people share and learn through scenarios such as this. It is for that reason I ask you all, how would you intend to do this? Have you ever had to do something similar? And, most of all, what do you think the large organisations will do to ensure they get a mass follower migration from old to new?